Monthly archives for November, 2012

“An Eagle for an Emperor, a Gyrfalcon for a King; a Peregrine for a Prince, and a Saker for a Knight; a Merlin for a lady, a Goshawk for a Yeoman, a Sparrowhawk for a Priest, and a Kestrel for a Knave” – from a poem in the Boke of St Albans 1486

I awoke with a groan. Quickly, I silenced my alarm clock and carefully tiptoed away into the darkness to avoid waking my wife. It was dark because the sun had yet to rise, it was also dark because it was cloudy and it was cloudy because it was pouring down with rain. I groaned again. Surely, only a wildlife photographer would consider getting up at such a ridiculous hour on such a ridiculously wet autumnal morning.

By the time that I’d squelched my way across half a mile of marshland it was getting noticeably lighter and the rain was easing. On location at last, I was ‘seen’ into a compact fabric hide that was doing its best to blend in among a stand of reeds and was located near to an upright skeleton of a dead tree that was sometimes used as a lookout by raptors..

After I’d got myself, tripod and camera gear inside it was a little cramped. I found that I couldn’t stand upright and neither could I sit comfortably while looking through my viewfinder. So I spent most of my time stooped over like one of the silhouettes on the non-PC Elderly People traffic warning sign. I was determined not to let a little back ache put me off. Besides, when it comes to raptor photography, discomfort often seems to be part of the package.

There are lots of rules in photography, rules like; you must get up in the middle of the night, you must suffer for your art and you must stare through your viewfinder without blinking for hours on end. There are a lot of other and much more comfortable rules – such as the rule of thirds for composition. One rule that I’ve repeatedly heard is ‘when photographing birds against the sky it should always be blue’, which didn’t help me at all as I hunched over to stare unblinkingly through my viewfinder towards unbroken cloud cover.

Several hours of nothing followed. Then in came the bird of princes and amazingly it perched in a photographable position. This is a lovely looking bird and I photographed it with the gusto of a greedy man at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Did it bother me that the sky was white? Not at all! You see, when it comes to the rules of photography I sail on the same rickety ship as The Pirates of the Caribbean, whose Captain Barbosa, when challenged with his apparent deviation from the Pirate Code, growled in reply with “Arrrgh, they’re more like guidelines really.”

Each morning when I get up one of the first things that I do is look out of a small north facing window. First I look down, then I look up and then down again. It’s almost a ritual and an essential part of starting my day. I don’t know why I do it, but I do. Even though, almost without fail, I’ll do exactly the same thing again as soon as I get to a main window. What am I doing? I’m checking weather conditions.

In winter I’ll be looking for any sign of snow. During the months of spring I live in hope of subtle mists. In the height of summer I’ll just look to see how it is, as this is usually a photographically dead time of the year for me. But in autumn, particularly in late autumn after a clear night, I’m looking for frost.

I look down to see how white the ground is, then I look up to see how clear the sky is and then back down to check how extensive the frost is (I’m often amazed at just how localised patches of frost can be). At this time of the year the ground still holds plenty of latent heat from summer and it doesn’t take much warmth from the sun to see off whatever frost has formed. A number of clear cold nights in a row helps, with sequential frosts building up in intensity. At least until a weather-change chases them away.

When leaves are falling, as they are now, I love to photograph what I think of as leaf mosaics. They are easy to see and I only have to walk as far as my garden to find them. This is good, because I know I won’t have long before any frost melts away. I take them as I find them. They are all frozen together anyway and trying to move a leaf inevitably destroys whatever arrangement has caught my eye.

This is simply a fun subject for me. I’m drawn to the intricate patterns like a moth to a flame. So with all of the interwoven shapes and colours laid out before me, I’m in my element. It releases my inner child and takes me back to a time when I used to kick leaves up into the air just to see how they would fall. And where is the harm in that?

I’ve just returned home a little bit tired but very happy. Last week was spent in bonny Scotland at its bonniest time of the year; autumn. I found that Scotland was liberally decorated with nature’s crown jewels. Jewels such as this berry laden rowan tree. Attracted by the gold and red colours contrasting nicely with pale green delicate lichens and stark grey bark, I couldn’t take my eyes off it or turn my camera away. I think that it’s a fine looking tree.

If I cracked open a fresh box of 100 photographers and asked them for their opinion I suspect a few would say that they don’t like this photograph, a few would show excellent taste and agree with me and the majority would fall somewhere between these two extremes. However, no matter where they fell on the Bell Curve, I’m sure most would agree that the image has at least a slight degree of merit.

Allowing my inner artist to break out I came up with a different kind of image. Now if I asked those 100 photographers the same question I would normally expect two kinds of response; ‘love it’, ‘hate it’. In fact I’d expect the Bell Curve to be turned upside down, with no middle ground and everyone pushed towards the edges. That’s just the way things seem to be. It’s interesting to note how doing something as simple as adjusting a lens during exposure can have such a polarising effect. And I thought that I needed a special filter for that.

This Blog…

This occasional blog is a tasty serving of nature and wildlife photography, with a side dish of my experiences out in the field and lightly seasoned with any random thoughts that occur to me along the way.

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